Welcome Laura!

We are ever-so-excited about this newest addition to the 2018 UP line up! If you joined us in past year, you may have met Laura and family at our last few UP conferences! This year we are thrilled about what she will be offering up for our eager ears to hear! Time to register so you don’t miss out on a fabulous time!unschoolersplatform.com/register#unschoolersplatform

Laura Lauzen-Collins lives in Bolingbrook Illinois with her husband and five children, aged 19, 14, 11, 9 and 6. When her first child was born during graduate school for psychology, she knew that she wanted him to learn in a self-directed manner but she was unaware of the unschooling movement at that time. As her son got older and Laura began teaching more developmentally-based psychology courses as well as delving more into educational theory, she had a growing belief that the traditional approach to education was not consistent with how she understood learning to occur and that it tended to squash natural curiosity and motivation. After a few years of struggling through the traditional school system with her son, she discovered the well-established unschooling movement. This approach provided and continues to provide a solution for the problems that she saw as endemic to the more traditional approach to education and also provided a personal solution for her family.

Laura continues to teach psychology classes at Moraine Valley Community College and DePaul University while striving to provide support for her children’s natural sense of curiosity and wonder. She teaches classes on a wide variety of psychological topics with a focus on the brain and development.

In the last 10-20 years, we have learned an enormous amount about the way the brain develops in infancy, through childhood and into adulthood. The child’s brain is not just less mature than the adult’s brain. Instead the brain of a child is qualitatively different than that of an adult. And beyond the child’s brain, the teen’s brain brings a new set of profound changes. Understanding these differences can be a powerful tool that helps us to better understand how our children and teens experience the world.